In 2006 I was approached by Nippon Koei UK to conduct a baseline small mammal survey for the Bumbuna Hydroelectric Project (BHP) in the Upper Seli River valley, Sierra Leone. The BHP will supply electricity to the capital Freetown and the city of Makeni downriver from the dam (Fig. 1). This development project that was delayed by twelve years of the devastating civil war in Sierra Leone.

Our work involved the sampling of small mammals along the Seli River Valley in the future area of the reservoir. The electricity generated will NOT benefit any of the villages upstream of the dam. Instead, some of the villages’ low-lying rice fields and palm groves will be flooded by the reservoir and travel between villages on opposite sides of the new lake will be made difficult.

I am in the middle of fighting with WEB CT to get my course content on the web. Unfortunately the planned follow-up Faculty-led Program to Ghana remains uncertain after first major grant request to support Ghanaian students and instructors was rejected. We did get a small grant to support a service learning element (Current idea: “Helping to build a reading room in a rural village affected by a protected area”). My Ghanaian colleague, Patrick Ekpe, at the University of Ghana Botany Department, is optimistic that we will find funding to realize the expedition – if not in May 2007, then perhaps in January 2008.

I had a holiday card from John Maxen at the Natural History Museum in London today. He has been a great logistic and moral support during and after the most recent survey project in Bumbuna, Sierra Leone, in January of 2006. Hard to believe almost a whole year has passed since that expediton began. A few days ago our local guide Minkailu from Kafogo (the one with the medicinal plant knowledge) called me again. He got the books but not the letter with some funds for the reading room project there. I promised to send more books after the course is over. Unfortunately, the telephone connection was bad and too brief. It must cost him a fortune to call me on a cell phone. The inequalities between our life and life in Africa are always present, be they economic, technical, or educational. Yet, that also makes connecting to Africa fascinating and rewarding.

I have been back from Sierra Leone for nine months now, working on the final report of our small mammal survey for NKUK. During our visit to Sierra Leone I had access to the internet only once at the very end in an internet café in Freetown. Needless to say I did not post any “dispatches from the field” to this Blog and haven’t visited it since our return.

I am now in the process of converting the experiences from this and several previous expeditions to West Africa into my new course “Challenges and Issues in African Nature Conservation and Sustainable Development” which is to cover everything from nature preservation to community development to indigenous rights.

In find myself torn between the extremes of John Oates’ Myth and Reality in the African Rain Forest and Jim Igoe’s Conservation and Globalization: A Study of National Parks and Indigenous Communities. The course should convey these extremes and provide no perfect answers but lead to stimulating discussions and thought.

Still no definite go-ahead from London after we send out desired departure date (January 1 + 2) almost 2 weeks ago. I send a follow-up note today.

I also changed the title of this blog to “Travels in West Africa” alluding to the famous travel diary by Mary Kingsley from 1893. In chapter 1 of her book she has this entry upon arrival in Sierra Leone from Liverpool, England:

No further word or contract from London yet. As usual these expeditions crunch on their starting deadlines. No matter how long term things are planned the actual implementation with visas and equipment orders always gets under time pressure.

This morning I read the chapter on Tiwai, the monkey sanctuary on a large island in the Moa River, southwestern Sierra Leone, in “Myth and Reality in the African Rainforest” (Oates 1999). What a sobering account of one hopeful “community based conservation project” initiated by Oates and others in 1981. But John Oates does not just blame the competing local factions and the growing political disorder in the country after 1991, but also “the tendency [of foreign planners] to design conservation plans likely to provide significant future benefits to themselves or their own organizations…”(Oates 1999:93).

This is the beginning of a diary about my upcoming small mammal biodiversity survey in Sierra Leone. An attempt to write and reflect about this experience from the preparation phase through the actual field work to the final report stage.

It is not just a factual log but hopefully will reflect thoughts, enthusiasm, worries, and interdisciplinary connections that go beyond the task at hand: providing systematic and zoogeographic data on small mammal (bat, shrew and rodent) distributions in one region of Sierra Leone to be inundated by a new hydroelectric dam. This will be one of several biodiversity reports(pdf) to be produced for this development project.

As I write this, our proposed date of departure is January 1 or 2, 2006. Return about 4 weeks later. These dates have been submitted to the contracting agency (NKUK). We expect to be mailed a contract, sign it, and start ordering supplies, get medical checks, and apply for visas.

It will be my first trip to Sierra Leone. I have worked with a colleague from SL on previous Rapid Assessment Programs (RAPs) organized by Conservation International in Guinea and Ghana and I have a faint connection to the YMCA in Freetown through a partnership with the YMCA (CVJM) in my native home region of Westphalia, Germany.

“Freetown” also reminds me occasionally of the Graham Greene novel “The Heart of the Matter” which was set there.

I hope this weblog might set the stage or open a dialog forum for a new course/seminar on “African Nature Conservation and Sustainable Development” which I hope to offer here at UVM.